Sam Altman says he misjudged how quickly AI would scramble the economy.
In an interview with David Senra, posted on Sunday, the OpenAI CEO said he believed GPT-4’s 2023 release would quickly put more software businesses “up for grabs.” Instead, he said he’s seen customers and companies largely sticking with familiar products and routines.
“I think it means we’ve all been too ambitious on timelines,” Altman said. “People keep doing the same things they’re doing. They keep buying from the same company. They keep sort of wanting to use their tools in the same way.”
He called that slower adoption cycle a “positive in many ways.”
Altman’s comments offer a more measured assessment than previous predictions at the start of the generative-AI boom.
AI labs — including OpenAI and Anthropic — have spent years promoting the technology’s potential to make companies leaner, start new businesses with fewer employees, and transform the economy. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei famously said the tech could eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar work in five years.
Silicon Valley’s AI predictions have had sweeping impacts, with consequences reverberating all the way to Wall Street. Several software-as-a-service stocks posted big declines in the first quarter of 2026, as investors increasingly bet that companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, and Asana would have to compete with AI tools capable of building bespoke operating systems. It was called the SaaSpocalypse.
Still, turning that potential into widespread corporate adoption is proving more complicated, Altman said. He likened that AI transition to customers shopping for their next at-home movie at Blockbuster in the early 2000s — right when Netflix had already started its DVD home-delivery model.
“It was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster,” he said. “That is an example that has stuck in my head of like force of habit, and the way people do things and changing behavior is just much harder than the tech nerds realize.”
Altman has described that resistance in his own work life, too. In the same interview, he said he still manually works through his inbox, even though OpenAI’s Codex could handle more of the task.
OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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